It is known to supply the atomizers of an installation for spraying coating products via product circulation conduits, also known as “circulatings”, from large-capacity tanks of products, whose capacity may attain several thousands of liters. Such tanks are generally located in storage premises at a distance from the spraying installations. Taking into account the usual distance between the store and the spraying installation, the products present in the circulatings during operation are of the order of several hundreds of liters, which renders it economically impossible to change products in such circulatings, as the quantities of products lost thereby are inacceptable. It is therefore necessary to provide one circulating per shade of colour used.
Now, the number of shades used in an installation for spraying coating products is tending to increase, which induces an increase in the number of circulating lines and increases the cost of the installation accordingly, while problems of space requirement are raised, particularly at the level of the passages through partitions.
The use of tanks borne on the arm of a multi-axis robot does not necessarily enable this problem to be solved. In effect, in the system known from EP-A-0 274 322, coating product circulatings are provided up to the zone of activity of the robot. In other systems, such as disclosed for example in EP-A-0 796 665, a carrousel is provided for filling cartridges with coating products but circulatings for supplying coating products are provided up to the vicinity of this carrousel for filling the cartridges.
In all cases, the permanent stirring of the coating products in the circulatings leads to a degradation of their physico-chemical properties due to the mechanical stresses to which they are subjected, in particular the shear undergone at the level of the changes in direction, the pumps or the pressure regulators.
Another solution known from DE-A-197 04 573 consists in using prefilled cartridges, which are for example disposable, but this leads to complex manipulations of a large number of cartridges, which is not economically satisfactory and renders the system of management of such an installation considerably complex.
It is a particular object of the present invention to overcome these problems by proposing a novel atomizer supply device which does not necessitate the construction of a circulating up to the vicinity of an installation and avoids the manipulation of too large a number of cartridges.